PERSPECTIVE ON MEXICO : Unintended Revolution in Chiapas : Passed over by Salinas, Camacho is tempted to ride his new image into an independent run for the presidency.

As peace talks evolve in a cathedral in Chiapas, another political drama with far-reaching consequences is unfolding in Mexico. It is becoming increasingly clear that the government’s representative, Manuel Camacho Solis, while negotiating with the Zapatista National Liberation Front is also testing a behind-the-scenes campaign to become Mexico’s next president. If he proceeds, Mexico may soon witness the unraveling of the ruling party and the end of the political system that has governed the country for more than 60 years.

As President Carlos Salinas de Gortari’s “commissioner for peace,” Camacho has spent the past few weeks negotiating and ingratiating himself with the masked leaders of Mexico’s peasant rebellion--and getting voluminous coverage in the media. In the meantime, his top aides have organized dinners for their boss with Mexico’s most powerful businessmen, rented a large office building (presumably for campaign headquarters) in Mexico City, leaked Camacho’s presidential aspirations to the foreign press and conducted nationwide polls to measure his popularity. The “Magnificent Seven”--as the Camacho team is jokingly referred to--are playing hard ball and high politics.

Many people, including Camacho himself, thought that he would be Salinas’ choice to head the PRI (Institutional Revolutionary Party) ticket in August. Instead, Salinas chose a protege, Luis Donaldo Colosio, whose campaign officially began on Jan. 1, the day the rebellion broke out in Chiapas.

Burdened by Camacho’s growing popularity and the anti-government sentiments awakened by Chiapas, Colosio is running a clumsy and ineffectual campaign. Camacho might try to persuade Salinas that Colosio has become a political liability and should be removed.

While this might appeal to Salinas’ well-known pragmatism, the president may not be willing to risk unleashing political havoc in the name of democracy. In that case, Camacho could run as the candidate of one of Mexico’s smaller parties that may be willing to support his candidacy in return for future power and prestige. Camacho would portray himself as Mexico’s modernizing yet moderate alternative; as more of a democrat than the PRI-tainted candidate and as less of a radical than the leftist Cuauhtemoc Cardenas.

Yet it would be a mistake to view Camacho as the beacon of democracy in Mexico. He has played by the PRI’s rules for more than 15 years. As mayor of Mexico City, he was recognized as a political broker, not as an apostle of substantive political reform. His considerable mediating skills helped Salinas save face after the turbulent and widely questioned presidential elections in 1988. And several of his top aides are young dinosaurs, known for their less than modern political practices.

Camacho is a Mexican version of Japan’s Morihiro Hosokawa--a pragmatic tactician using a crisis and the attendant outcry for reform to further his political standing. Like Hosokawa, he can be viewed as a modernizer but also as an opportunist, seeking to transform the political system so that he can lead it. Once in power, however, like most politicians, he would have to be pushed and prodded to loosen the reins.

Would a Camacho candidacy spur political change in Mexico? Initially it would split an already divided and bewildered PRI. Ever since the Chiapas uprising, members of Mexico’s ruling party no longer know whether to gamble on Salinas the lame duck, Colosio the dazed and confused or Camacho the loose cannon. Colosio’s removal would certainly lead his supporters to revolt, and a period of instability and political cannibalism would ensue. Yet a Camacho candidacy would mean the end of the PRI as Mexico has known it, opening windows of opportunity for the kind of competitive politics Mexico so desperately needs. Whether that is worth the climate of uncertainty that his experimental challenge to PRI would create is something only Camacho can calculate.

Mexican politics were in a state of flux before the Chiapas crisis erupted, but Camacho may consider the gravity of that complication reason enough to put his presidential ambitions on the back burner for six years. If Colosio miraculously recovers in the polls, or if the negotiations in Chiapas get bogged down, Camacho may retrench and wait until after the August election to build his own political base, a Mexican social democratic party, from which to run for the presidency in 2000.

In any event, it will be a great irony if Camacho the rejected uses his role as commissioner of peace to springboard back into the political wars.